Flying High.

Nearly a decade ago, Quebec's Ecole des Metiers de l'Aerospatiale de Montreal (the Montreal School of Aerospace Trades) became part of a massive education reform that takes most career education in the province out of comprehensive high schools and invests millions of dollars in specialized vocational schools.

The Ecole des Metiers de l'Aerospatiale de Montreal (EMAM) looks like no high school you've ever seen.

Year-round, even in the 30-below-zero winter freeze, students wearing work boots and protective eyewear troop into the huge, glass-fronted building in four shifts, the first starting at 6 a.m. and the last ending at half past midnight. French and English mingle in the air with the sounds of lathes and power drills, bench grinders and rivet guns. In a model factory the size of two football fields, students huddle over tables of blueprints and engine parts; in a hangar across the hall, they install cables, build airplane doors and take apart landing gear.

Some of the six planes and countless parts used in the school were donated by local aerospace companies, including Pratt & Whitney, Bell Helicopter and the Montreal-based aerospace giant Bombardier-Canadair. Other things were designed from scratch.

"We built the equipment we are using in some programs," says Pierre Belanger, the school's director. "We didn't find pedagogical equipment, because there is no school like this anywhere in North America. The difference between this and other schools is, it's really like the industry."

After a year to 18 months at this ecole-usine, or factory-school, students can find work in structural, mechanical or electrical aircraft assembly, machining or numerical control, earning from $7 to $19 (Canadian) per hour (about $4.75 to $13 an hour in U.S. dollars). All have completed a month-long stage, or unpaid internship, at an aerospace company, many at Bombardier.

For the Comission des Ecoles Catholiques de Montreal, the city's French-language school board (a separate board governs English-language schools), EMAM is an unprecedented venture. Founded to cope with educational and economic problems in Montreal and to supply technicians for a huge, churning aerospace industry, the school has tested the idea of education-industry partnership at every turn. It has been a workshop for education reform and a laboratory for compromises. And, at least for the moment, with 2,000 prospective students on its waiting list, it seems to be flying high.

A promising partnership

In 1990, when school board officials sat down to talk with industry representatives about opening an aerospace high school, more than half of Canada's aerospace activity was happening in Quebec province, mainly in greater Montreal. Between attrition and growth, the industry was generating about 2,000 jobs a year--and scraping for capable hands to fill them. At the same time, Quebec's overall unemployment rate was in the double digits, where it remained throughout the 1990s, making steady aerospace jobs look especially good.

Meanwhile, the province's education system was in trouble. Education was a battleground, with national political parties and agendas running the schools. High school dropout rates were alarming--up to 40 percent at a few schools. Vocational education was underfunded and stigmatized until a school reform in the late 1980s.

"Before the reform our vocational education was not up to date," says Yvan Ouellet, the Montreal School Board's head of vocational education. "We didn't have the teachers that were top-notch. We didn't have money to renew the equipment. Vocational education was for students that had problems academically or behaviorally."

The reform mandated that students finish three years of secondary school before they could enter vocational education programs. (As a result, the average age of an EMAM student is 26.) It took career education out of comprehensive high schools for the most part, investing millions of dollars in new, specialized vocational schools.

As part of the reform, the board sat down with the Center for Aerospace Manpower Activities in Quebec (CAMAQ), an aerospace industry group representing 13 large companies and four major unions, to plan a new high school. Funds rolled in from all sides--a $5 million (Canadian) federal grant obtained by CAMAQ, $20 million from Quebec's Ministry of Education and another $5 million from Montreal's school board, plus donated planes and parts from local companies.

"A lot was done by industry to have us buy the right equipment," Ouellet says. "Instead of using our purchasing department, we used theirs. They gave us a lot of raw material also. Like wire that was scrap for them--if we had bought it, it could have been between 5 and 10 million dollars." (The companies benefit, too: their donations are tax deductible, with a tax credit of 20 to 40 percent on top of that, CAMAQ's Carmy Hayes says.)

Turbulence

Every aspect of the school, from the building blueprints to the graduation requirements, was hammered out with the local aerospace heavyweights. They even lent technical writers to revise the curriculum. But when EMAM finally opened in 1994, the school board disagreed with the companies on many details, from adjusting class sizes to changing industry hiring needs (part of the deal, claimed the companies) to drug testing for incoming students (absolutely not, said the school board). There erupted what Marcelle Hardy, a University of Quebec at Montreal sociologist who studied the school, called "a deaf debate," both within the education department and between the school board and CAMAQ.

Finally, in a highly public confrontation in 1997, the companies demanded more control over the school. Bell Helicopter's director of human resources, Charles Larocque, came to a school board meeting with other industry officials to say that EMAM wasn't producing the workers he needed.

"I told the school, stop training electrical assemblers because we don't need that," Larocque said at the meeting, which made the Montreal Gazette. "We need structural assemblers. That was two years ago. They're still training the same number of electrical assemblers."

A new contract was signed later that year, giving more power to the companies. The first principal was replaced, and Belanger--who has an industry background--was brought in. Now the number of classes varies with industry demand, and structural assembly is the biggest program.

Well grounded

EMAM's graduates, for the most part, aren't complaining.

"We spent about 80 percent of our time in the shop," says Victor Mistiouk, 35, who graduated from construction college before deciding to change careers to aircraft assembly. "It was very interesting for me. It's a very intense program; you have to study at home. Some stuff is really complicated."

Mistiouk did his internship at Avcorp in Vancouver, a Bombardier subcontractor, and was offered a job there starting at $13.60 an hour (roughly $9.30 an hour in U.S. dollars). After a year he moved back to Montreal; now, just a year and a half out of what is technically a high school program, he supervises the 12-person assembly department of another Bombardier subcontractor.

Mistiouk says what he learned in the free one-year course at EMAM held up well against the sometimes expensive three-year postsecondary certificates of his co-workers at Avcorp.

But "in the shop it's hard to tell" who's better prepared, he says. "We did the same job and our wages were the same. Maybe [postsecondary graduates know] more theory. [They] might know engines, hydraulics, maybe some avionics. We don't have time for that at EMAM. We were prepared for structures."

EMAM applicants are screened for technical skills and problems like color-blindness--not for academic skills. And all the school's classes are technical except for a short module on job search skills.

"They weren't even checking maths for a while, and then they started checking maths," says structural assembly instructor Robert Daly, who retired after 27 years as an aircraft mechanic with Canadair and took a big pay cut to teach full time at EMAM. "Like you have to transfer from fractions to decimals. Some students never saw a fraction before, and I don't have the time to give them a course."

A supervisory job like Mistiouk's, therefore, may be the exception. Most graduates are expected to go into straightforward assembly or repair jobs, which is where the next decade's job growth is expected to be.

"The trade school will produce what we call intelligent hands--shop workers," says Hayes, whose manpower organization is headquartered right inside the school. "They don't have in their career project to become supervisors or work in an office.... Basically we are not expecting these graduates to take any decision. They will not be allowed to change a process or a tool, to repair a gauge or whatever."

But for Daly, EMAM's approach--with older students, workplace-like conditions and no distracting academic courses--makes more sense than a longer program with less time in the shop.

"You're not going to start working on an airplane on a part-time basis," he says. "You can't do that it's a full-time task. You have to get involved in it, and not just as a leisure-time activity complementary to your schooling. If you're going to get into it like that, it's just not worth it. They have to be perfect. If [the plane's] not perfect, it's going to crash."

Flying solo?

As the school builds a reputation for competent, focused graduates, employers in other provinces and even in nonaerospace fields have come looking for its students.

To take advantage of this, and to recoup more of the cost of the school's extraordinary facilities, EMAM is adding more machining programs and looking into partnerships and distance learning arrangements with schools in Saskatchewan, British Columbia, Manitoba and Alberta.

"We've been trying on the Internet to find a school in the United States where we can have a joint venture with them," principal Belanger says.

Such expansion could correct a serious imbalance: the school's dependence on Bombardier.

"My whole class did our stage at Bombardier," structural assembly graduate Karl Whiter says. "But they didn't hire us; they only hired four people out of the 21 they had there." With its newest plane not yet in production, the aerospace giant--which employs 41,000 people worldwide, 10,000 in the Montreal area alone--didn't need as many structural assemblers as planned. The EMAM graduates, expecting jobs at Bombardier and pushed to take internships there, were left high and dry.

Whiter, interviewed four months after graduation last year, had been working for a Bombardier subcontractor that paints, waxes and strips planes. Several of his classmates are employed making airplane food trays, he says.

"They say the industry is in such demand for structural employees--well, I sent out about 50 resumes and I haven't got a response yet," Whiter says. He expects to land a job in his field soon, but he and other students say the school depends too heavily on Bombardier.

"If there are lots of other companies that have contributed to the building and the funding of this school, we'd like to know where they are," he says. "They (school officials) pretty much focus you on going to Bombardier. But you would think that the school board would want to have more interests than one specific company."

Still, with the local aerospace industry continuing to grow, the school seems to be a good deal for everyone.

The companies receive tax credits for their help and get their workers trained for flee. (Bell Helicopter's Larocque put the cost of internally training a structural assembler at $10,000.)

The students get, besides marketable machining and assembly skills, the chance to enter an industry of which many say they are very proud.

Quebec's ministry of education kicks in about $6,000 per student per year. But in Canada, where colleges and universities are state-funded, that's a small price to pay for a change in the image of vocational education.

"Everyone wants their children to become lawyers," the school board's Ouellet says. "Imagine the cost of this socially. If you go to college and college is free, if you go for three years and then come back to high school, why did the Ministry of Education pay for those three years? Of course some people are always going to change their mind, but I think it's too much."

Margaret Litvin, a former editor of the Vocational Education Weekly, is a freelance writer and doctoral student in Chicago.